modern life is boring

Boredom is not a subject that has been studied very successfully. There are thousands of books on power and violence and sexual problems and depression and anxiety but hardly any on boredom. Philosophers have given it a cold shoulder. Foucoult never wrote Boredom and Civilisation, Heidegger didn’t pen Boredom and Time and Sartre may have written Nausea but he didn’t write ‘Bored shitless’. 

Yet as a dad you know one thing is going to come, sooner rather than later: “I’M BORED.” What is the thing you get to hear from teenagers during a TV voxpop on any town, city or village: “It’s fucking boring here.” As a child my sister had a French exchange and her new pal knew no English. But she had a dictionary. One of the first things she did was to rustle through it and point to a word: BORED. Which she pronounced Bore-red. After a few days she had learned to say “I am bor-red. I am the very bor-red.” 

Boredom is when the world lets you down. Depression is when you let the world down. Philip Larkin so truthfully wrote: first boredom, then fear. Many commentators, like former laureate Andrew Motion, misunderstand this notion of boredom- surely you’re frightened of life first and then it gets boring? But this is normal, regular, healthy boredom not the deep existential boredom that Larkin knows, that kids, whether in a delightful home counties village or an innercity housing estate know. Existential boredom is the great killer, the destroyer of decades of young life. It is the corrosive poison of our times and has nothing to do with being ‘a bit bored with that now’ as we speak of a lack of interest in Miles Davis or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Normal boredom happens when you are no longer challenged, the job is too easy. Existential boredom happens when the whole wold ceases to engage you. The cogs are slipping and quite obviously it is the prelude to depression- or anxiety- as Larkin wrote.

My sisters used to say towards the end of the summer holidays that they were bored and looking forwards to school. Being a contrarian I set myself against every commonly held view. I knew from encounters at school and through TV that kids were ‘supposed’ to find ordinary life boring so I was determined never to be bored. It was decision rather than anything based on observation or experience. And yet once I had made it (I also made a decision never to say ‘I’m tired’ even if I was) I found I never was bored- even at school, where watching the clock was the norm, I never associated this with boredom. I set my problem solving mind to solving the problem of what to do next and inadvertently created the space need for natural interest to take over.

You see we’ve got it all wrong. Life is fundamentally replete with things that are very very interesting. We don’t need to DO anything. Just make a big enough empty space to let those interests speak to us. But once we assume life is fundamentally boring then we never give ourselves that kind of space. We think as parents we have to do stuff, fill the screaming void of our children’s lives with activities and fun stuff and when that fails TV and video games because we pessimistically assume (in our actions if not our words) that life is intrinsically boring and must be jazzed up. One wealthy friend who had kids before I did, remarked wryly that his old sock and an empty cigarette pack were his son’s favourite toys- not the hundreds of pounds worth of plastic gimcrackery given by friends and family. The child knew.

When you covertly or overtly think life is basically boring and only by a constant effort at entertainment can you avoid being engulfed, your kids pick it up. But the killer thing is: they’re right.

I, and the other unbored contrarians, working hard to never be bored were wrong in the way that the alienated and disgruntled always are. In some senses the majority are always right- what I mean is- modern life isboring. But that does not mean every form of living is. The ‘normal person’ is both wedded to modern life but is fundamentally trapped by the idea that this life is the only way of life possible. Usually it is fear backed- they imagine that prehistoric man lived a life nasty brutish and short. (Which widespread research into hunter gatherer and pre-industrial tribes proves completely false.) But even so, just a look at other people around the globe who use some modern medicine and conveniences but don’t live as we do in the industrialised developed world. Using modern tools doesn’t preclude a different way of living, a different set of values to the forty hour week hump and die formula that the lousy modern world boils down to.

Modern life is boring. Face that one first.